When you click the button, Google tells your friends, family, and the rest of the world that you recommended the link.

For now, +1 buttons are only in Google search results, but Google says that they'll soon be elsewhere.

We're guessing you'll see them in articles, videos, on ads, and even on Amazon product pages – everywhere you see Facebook "like" buttons and Twitter "re-tweet" buttons today.

Speculating, we assume Google will use all the recommendations to not only improve search results, but also to bring content and URLs into some sort of content stream on Google.com that will look a lot like the Twitter stream and the Facebook News Feed looks now.

Increasingly, people are finding content to consume and things to buy online on Facebook (and to a lesser degree, Twitter) before they ever get a chance to search for it on Google. +1 is Google's effort to get in on that action.

And that's why Google's so paranoid about social that it's tying ALL employee's bonuses to the social strategy's success.